In XP-002325835, there is described a 3GPP technical specification of group services and system aspects, in particular an end-to-end quality of service concept and architecture. Also, there are described IP level mechanisms necessary in providing end-to-end quality of service involving GPRS networks, including possible interaction between the IP level and the GPRS level, as well as the application level and the IP level.
Also, in XP-002325836, there is described an operation of a charging gateway and a related PDP context information with respect to session management parameters. Here, a quality of service profile information element includes quality of service negotiated between the mobile station and a serving data support node at PDP context activation or a new quality of service QoS negotiated in the PDP context modification procedure.
Further, in XP-002325837, there is described a 3GPP technical specification of architectural enhancements for end-to-end quality of service operation. In particular, there is described a concept of an admission administrative domain, wherein the admission administrative domain defines a set of bearer devices and gateway whose resources and routes are managed.
Recently, the variety of application sessions to be operated on top of a wireless bearer has significantly increased. Typical examples are video clips, SMS short message services, MMS multi-media message services, ring tone downloads, WAP services, wireless WEB services, point-to-point multimedia services, etc.
According to the different type of application sessions, usually different types of bearer services will be initiated, either in a core network or a wireless access network. Further, different application services require different quality of service classes for the underlying bearer services specifying maximum bit rate, delivery order, maximum service data unit size, service data unit format information, service data unit error ratio, bit error ratio, delivery of erroneous service data units, transfer delay, guaranteed bit rate, traffic handling priority, allocation/retention priority, source statistics descriptor, signaling indication, to name just some of bearer service attributes specified according to quality of service classes.
However, with existing solutions for identifying quality of service class for a specific application session in view of available bearer services a problem is that the application session running in the end terminal needs to request via an application programming interface from the bearer service a certain quality of service class. This requires that the application session as such needs to be updated regarding functionality for quality of service class specification.
Further, the conventional technology requires that the application session is aware of available quality of service class definitions on the bearer service level, which quality of service class definitions may differ and vary according to different standardizations.